7.12.2006

gym

Tonight was my first time back in the gym (gymnastics gym) in about 3.5 years. My how time flies. I dragged my friend Nathan along, same Nathan whom Eva dragged to run the Nike Women's marathon. He's good for that sort of thing :P. What I didn't count on was the 15 minutes of hard cardio running down the blue strip you see in the pictures - forwards, backwards, sideways, high knees, frog jumps. By that time I was about to throw up. Not used to cardio of that intensity. I took a breather (literally, like I had to take a hit from my inhaler thanks to this adult onset asthma of mine). After the mat hell, we did continuous jumps - tuck, pike, straddle, 1/1 turn, forwards and then backwards - on the tumble track (long black trampoline thing there) and ran back on the blue strip. Soon after that I had to park my fat ass on that stack of blue mats next to the fence there and silently dry heave while sobbing a bit inside trying not to lose my grilled McChicken sandwich and fries. After I recovered from the cardio warm up, the stretching helped me regain my strength (and pride) and I managed to pull off some aerials and for my finale a round-off, backhandspring (flip flop), back tuck on the 40 x 40 floor (left of the fence). Not bad for an old lady who packed on 10 lbs in the last 6 months. I think I'll be coming back and trying to get back into shape because like one of the other ex gymnasts there said, gymnastics works muscles that no other physical activity works.

BTW, this is unrelated but here is a really interesting article about some folks studying the effects of magic mushrooms. Now, I've had to go through the process of getting "human subjects" approval from my university and all I was doing was interviewing people. It took me three months of going back and forth and rewriting my informed consent form to get approval. I can't imagine how the hell they got approval to conduct that study but kudos to them for doing it. It reminds me of an article I read about the guy who invented ecstacy for therapeutic purposes. I totally agree with scientists who argue that our society demonizes the use of these drugs when there really is good reason to incorporate them into psychotherapy for certain patients under controlled conditions. If you haven't figured out by now I support the legalization of several substances. That doesn't make me a libertarian, hippy, or fanatical promotor of drug use. I just lean left and have my reasons for it.

I think I read somewhere that fries are actually chock full of gymnastics skill radicals, so it was good to scarf down that pack before your workout. Otherwise, your back tuck probably wouldn't have slipped in there. Wait, I can't remember if the article said it was fries, or magic mushrooms.

random trivia about human subjects: someone at my school wanted to interview amish family members about their use of technology. she said that because it was family, it was at least as difficult as getting permission to take blood.